30 Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire, Emma Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

dramatist of the early 1590s tried to sound like Marlowe: Peele, Greene, Nashe, Shakespeare, Anon. And it is not just authors who are aware of the sound of Tamburlaine (the hero and the play); literary characters themselves frequently mention what it is like to hear, or talk like, Tamburlaine. Simon Eyre, shoemaker-turned-mayor in Thomas Dekker's comedy The Shoemaker's Holiday , says he is not nervous about meeting royalty because he “knows how to speak to a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine and [if] he were here” (20.59–60). 6
    Eyre means, primarily, that he can hold his own in terms of tone and vocabulary. But other literary characters are equally sensitive to poetry and prose rhythms and the differences between the two. In George Peele's The Old Wife's Tale (1595) a character who has just spoken in hexameter verse (verse of six stressed syllables) says, “I'll now set my countenance and to her in prose” (l. 641). 7 When Orlando greets Ganymede/Rosalind in As You Like It —“Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!”—Jaques takes this as his cue to exit: “Nay, then, God b'wi'you an you talk in blank verse” (4.1.29–30). Jaques has just been conversing with Rosalind in prose; he draws the audience's attention to the fact that the scene is now changing register from (satiric) prose to (Petrarchan) poetry. Rosalind is similarly sensitive poetically when Celia first quotes Orlando's love poems to her: she criticizes them for being hyper-metrical (having “more feet than the verses would bear”; 3.2.162–3). And in this play even the goatherd Audrey wonders what “poetical” means. When Benedick tries to write a love poem in a play written almost entirely in prose, Much Ado , he is aware of literary precedent: classical lovers like Leander and Troilus “still run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse” (5.2.32–3). Blank verse is synonymous with poetry. When the players arrive in Elsinore, Hamlet anticipates that the boy actor playing the lady “shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse shall halt for't” (2.2.326–7). In other words, if she is censored or interrupted, the lines will not scan.
    It is interesting to note the dates of these three Shakespeare plays; they cluster together in the period 1598–1600. These are plays in which the characters are intensely aware of the relations between drama and life; part of that awareness is a self-consciousness about sound. In the same period, in Julius Caesar (1599), Cassius comments on the inept rhymes of the poet who has entered with a couplet to try to reconcile Cassius and Brutus: “How vilely doth this cynic rhyme!” (4.2.185). 8 Brutus agrees, calling the poet a “jigging fool” (4.2.189)—a pejorative phrase like Marlowe's “jigging wits” (the RSC Shakespeare edition glosses it as “rhyming in a jerky and metrically unsophisticated manner”; our italics). As the RSC gloss indicates (and our italics emphasize), references to rhyme are often in tandem with references to meter. They are part of an awareness of what poetry sounds like.
    In Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1599), a discussion about meter moves quickly to a dialogue about rhyme (and is also filled with double entendres: as those highly charged split pentameter lines attest, poetic rhythm has a sexual component). Balurdo tries to compose a poem. His page, Dildo, identifies an error in Balurdo's versification; he then offers a (bathetic) rhyme:
    Balurdo: I'll mount my courser and most gallantly prick –
    Dildo: “Gallantly prick” is too long, and stands hardly in the verse, sir.
    Balurdo: I'll speak pure rhyme and so will bravely prank it
    That I'll to love like a—prank—prank it—a rhyme for “prank it”?
    Dildo: Blanket.
    (4.1.268–73)
    Benedick has the same problem in Much Ado : “I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby’” (5.2.35–6).
    The mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream don't discuss rhyme but they too are metrically aware. When